Pages tagged with "Ira Aldridge"http://www.rc.umd.edu/taxonomy/term2/17384/all
enObi Nowhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/obi/index.html">Obi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<h2 style="text-align: center">Obi</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center"><i>Obi</i> Now</h3>
<h4 style="text-align: center">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</h4>
<ol>
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<p>I first raised the possibility of staging scenes and songs from the early nineteenth-century musical play <i>Obi, or Three-Fingered Jack</i> in casual conversation with Jeff Cox, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, in the late spring of 1999. Jeff's expertise in the field of Romantic popular theater enabled him to help me appreciate the many difficulties such a staging would have to overcome: gathering crew and auditioning for roles, casting (race-appropriate? race-indifferent?), finding exotic props, making period-appropriate costumes and using period-appropriate make-up (blackface!?), not to mention the standard hurdles like setting rehearsal schedules, finding theater-space, choreographing, and a thousand other apparently insuperable obstacles&#8212;not least of them, funding. But we had only a vague idea of the difficulties that would arise specifically in today's highly-charged atmosphere of racial and identity politics. What we did know was that staging <i>Obi</i> would, without a doubt, be painful&#8212;and worst of all, painful less for us than for others.</p>
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<p>So I'd like to begin this introduction by addressing the question that my gifted Afro-American director for the Boston production, Vincent Siders, first put to me after having read the opening scene of the <i>Obi</i> pantomime: Why? Why stage such offensive material? And why now, at a millenial moment when we should be more aware than ever both of the desperate need to put such things behind us, and the dreary prospect that awaits us if we do not&#8212;another thousand years, perhaps, of the same intractable legacy of bigotry, hatred, and oppression.</p>
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<p>Why? Why <i>Obi</i>? and why now?</p>
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<p>First, to educate&#8212;and not just to inform, although you will find plenty of historical information in this <i>Praxis</i> volume, but really to "educate," in the literal sense of to "lead out." Of all the arts, theater excels at leading us out of ourselves, out of the here and now, and imaginatively into other existences, other mental universes.</p>
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<p>But why would anyone wish to be "led out" into a historical reality as sad and painful as slavery? Why revive these degrading events and demeaning stereotypes?</p>
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<p>One of the first questions we ask ourselves when faced with any historical event, painful or not, is, "What was it like? What did it feel like?" At least, that is true for me. And I think this curiosity about the past is deeply related to our need for identity, for a sense of self. But knowing who we were does not just help us understand who we are&#8212;it also enables us to decide who we want to be&#8212;and who we do not want to be. Knowledge of the past can liberate us in this way, however, only to the extent that we exercize our historical imaginations on it. We must, as Percy Shelley put it, "Imagine what we know." People who lack the ability to imagine themselves into their own pasts lack identities. They suffer from what we call "amnesia." The stories of their lives sound to them as though they had happened to someone else.</p>
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<p>Of course, sometimes it is a blessing to forget, to make the past "not me." Working with Vincent and talking with my colleague from the School for the Arts at Boston University, Jim Spruill, and his wife, playwright Lynda Patton, as well as other members of the New African Company in Boston, has made me more aware than ever that for Afro-Americans, the historical experience of slavery and racism requires no great effort of the imagination to re-live in the present: its painful legacy is ubiquitous&#8212;in racial profiling, in hate crimes, in discrimination at every level of society. Why add the pain of past experience to that of the present? What could possibly justify it? For one thing, there might be value in coming to understand how this legacy originated, how it grew, how it came to be accepted, and&#8212;more important&#8212;what steps were taken by heroic individuals to make it no longer acceptable, and to stop it from being passed on. But more of that in a moment.</p>
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<p>For Euro-Americans, understanding the historical experience of slavery requires more difficult efforts at imaginative identification&#8212;we were not the slaves, after all, but the enslavers. Such efforts are not impossible for people of good will. But there is another effort at identification that is the special responsibility of Euro-Americans&#8212;an effort that is, in some ways, even more painful than imagining what it must have been like to be black in the slave-holding West. I mean the painful effort of identification with our own forebears' bigotry, callousness, and cruelty&#8212;an indifference to suffering made all the more appalling, it seems to me, by their negligent, everyday acceptance of it. What shape does our own obliviousness, our own indifference take, here, now, at the beginning of a new millenium? What moral astigmatisms afflict us that only physicians of the future will have the lenses to correct? Imagining what we know makes us ask ourselves these quesions.</p>
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<p>The only way to enjoy the pratfalls and silliness of the sentimental comedy around which the story of <i>Obi</i> is woven is to refuse to see that, beneath, behind, around it all, and supporting it all, is the abomination that was black slavery. And yet, some of us, perhaps most of us&#8212;black and white&#8212;do forget. Some of us even laugh. Comedy and slapstick will do that&#8212;and so will good acting. That is both the beauty, and the danger, of theater. The stage is, fundamentally, an amoral medium of identification, a tool to enlist imaginative sympathy, regardless of who wields it. That is why, over the centuries, governments have tried to ban it, to censor it, to prevent it from falling into the "wrong" hands&#8212;as did the English government in the era when the <i>Obi</i> pantomime premiered.</p>
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<p>If the performance of <i>Obi</i> has any scholarly&#8212;or moral&#8212;value, then, it will lie only partly in conveying facts about the past&#8212;about slavery, or about the conventions of pantomime, or the history of English popular theater. Most of its educational value will lie in its ability to make visible to us our own acts of denial in the present, our own cultural amnesia, as we watch ourselves being "led out" into other, historically specific acts of denial, other moments of waking sleep, in the past. But that is, after all, what theater is good at, isn't it? Making us dream awake?</p>
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<p>So, that's one reason: to educate.</p>
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<p>Secondly, to celebrate. The impact of Ira Aldridge, the great Afro-American actor and the first American actor of any race to achieve truly international fame, cannot be ignored when we consider the history of the <i>Obi</i> plays. Without him, it is quite possible that the <i>Obi</i> pantomime would not have been revised and reworked as a spoken-word melodrama, or if it had, that it would never have become the sensation it became. But even more importantly&#8212;and this goes back to theater's ability to educate, to "lead out"&#8212;we cannot fully appreciate the towering achievement of Aldridge unless we understand&#8212;imaginatively&#8212;what he was up against.</p>
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<p>Which brings me to my third reason: to inspire. In early nineteenth-century England and America, the stereotypes of the black man in the white mind had closed off nearly every serious avenue of theatrical advancement for black actors&#8212;a situation that was to be repeated over and over again in the history of black entertainment, and a situation that continues to this day, in one form or another. Many of these demeaning roles were considered benign&#8212;even positive and uplifting!&#8212;back when the <i>Obi</i> pantomime was first performed. And then came Ira Aldridge.</p>
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<p>Aldridge helped put an end to all that by taking on, with unprecedented power and conviction, the most sacrosanct&#8212;and violent&#8212;roles of the white Bard&#8212;roles like Othello and Macbeth and Richard the Third, as well as Lear and Shylock&#8212;and by popularizing new roles like that of the despised Jack Mansong. In Jack, the violent, rebellious slave of the planters' worst nightmares was given a voice of righteous denunciation, the same voice already accorded the Gothic revenge-figure of white popular drama. And that voice was, literally, the voice of Ira Aldridge. Speaking through Aldridge, Jack legitimized his formerly unmotivated violence by indicting the legal and religious fictions that had provoked it. In short, we cannot fully appreciate the heroism of Ira Aldridge as a black actor in a white world of theater without understanding the historically embedded racism that made up the very cultural air he breathed. And that fuller appreciation cannot help but enhance the power of Aldridge's example to inspire us to emulate him.</p>
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<p>Why <i>Obi</i>? To educate, to celebrate, to inspire. And why now? July 2, 2000 was the 200th anniversary of the premiere of the <i>Obi</i> pantomime in London. July 24 was the 193rd anniversary of the birth of Ira Aldridge. Aldridge's prodigious talent can be reckoned by this birthday: when he first took the stage at the African Grove Theater in New York as Rolla, the rebellious Peruvian chieftan of Sheridan's <i>Pizzaro</i>, he could not have been more than 15 years old. When he first appeared as Jack Mansong at the Theater Royal, Edinburgh, he was barely a decade older, and already a name to be reckoned with.</p>
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</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/rzepka-charles-j">Rzepka, Charles J.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/charles-j-rzepka" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles J. Rzepka</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/vincent-siders" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vincent Siders</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jim-spruill" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jim Spruill</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/boston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Boston</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/colorado" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Colorado</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:26 +0000rc-admin22704 at http://www.rc.umd.eduIntroduction: Obi, Aldridge and Abolitionhttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/obi/index.html">Obi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<h2 style="text-align: center">Obi</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center">Introduction: <i>Obi</i>, Aldridge and Abolition</h3>
<h4 style="text-align: center">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</h4>
<ol>
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<p><i>Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack</i> began life on 2 July 1800 as a pantomime at the Little Theater in the Haymarket, a summer venue for the Covent Garden company of London. It was based on the true story of Jack Mansong, an escaped Jamaican slave whose original African name, according to some sources, was Karfa. The tale of Three-Fingered Jack had been popularized by Dr. Benjamin Moseley in <i>A Treatise on Sugar</i> (1799) and by William Earle, Jr., in <i>Obi; or, the History of Three-finger'd Jack</i> (1800). According to these accounts, Mansong had run away from his master in 1780 and organized a group of escaped slaves into a feared band of robbers and marauders. Their hide-out was a cave in the mountainous interior of the island. Subsequent to his escape, Mansong lost two of his fingers in a skirmish with the authorities: hence his nickname.</p>
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<p>In December of 1780, the governor of Jamaica issued a proclamation offering a reward of 100 pounds for Jack Mansong's capture, to which the Jamaican House of Assembly added another 200 pounds, with a promise of freedom to "any slave that shall take or kill the said Three-fingered JACK. . . . and if any one of his accomplices will . . . bring in his head, and hand wanting the fingers, such accomplice shall be entitled to a Free Pardon, and his Freedom" (quoted by Cundall, 36). Jack was captured and killed soon afterward, and his head and three-fingered hand, preserved in a bucket of rum, were brought to Kingston as evidence in order to claim the reward.</p>
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<p>"Obi" is short for <i>obeah</i>, a West African form of sorcery in which Jack was thought by most of the slave community, and even by some of the planters themselves, to be an adept. He had supposedly been instructed in the art by his mother. "Obi" also referred to the horn or fetish by which <i>obeah</i> practitioners exerted their magic powers. These powers could supposedly be directed at enemies in the form of a wasting disease, or confer invisibility or superhuman strength on the <i>obi</i> sorcerer or sorceress.</p>
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<p>Relying on Moseley's and Earle's accounts, comic actor John Fawcett wrote the <i>Obi</i> pantomime for the Covent Garden company's 1800 summer season at the Haymarket, in the West End of London. With music by Samuel Arnold, a well-known composer for the London stage, the pantomime was, literally, performed in mime, with signboards, songs and choruses. Mimed action flourished in England during this period, especially in the so-called "popular" theaters, partly because English law prohibited the performance of plays with spoken dialogue&#8212;including Shakespeare&#8212;from all but two theaters in the realm, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, both located in the West End. The Haymarket Theater was permitted to perform spoken-dialogue plays with the Covent Garden company in residence, but in order to cash in on the new popular forms, including pantomime and melodrama, the house would sometimes stage works of the more "popular" sort. The original cast of <i>Obi</i> was entirely white, performing the roles of slaves in blackface&#8212;a device deeply offensive to today's audiences, whatever their race. I am indebted to my colleague and specialist in West Indian literature, Larry Briener, for his suggestion that we re-create the effect of the original cross-racial make-up by using black and white half-masks. (Kitty, a mulatto, wears a black-and-white striped mask.) Cross-dressed roles, such as Tuckey, played by a woman, and the Obi Woman, played by a man, were also common at this time, as were "breeches" roles for young women like Rosa&#8212;in order to show off their legs! (<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/fig1.html">see fig.1</a>)</p>
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<p>The <i>Obi</i> pantomime dominated the London stage that summer, and one of its songs, "A Lady of Fair Seville City," even became the equivalent of a modern "Top-Ten Hit."<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#1"><sup>1</sup></a> The pantomime continued to play in London at both the patent and the popular theaters as well as throughout the provinces for at least the next three decades. The silent role of Jack, which substantially boosted the career of a young Charles Kemble in the original production (Williamson, 29-31), raised the stage profiles of numerous character-actors to follow. The most famous of these was Richard Smith (<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/fig2.html">see fig. 2</a>)</p>
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<p>With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the English Abolition Movement began to catch its second wind. (Its first phase had resulted in the passage of the Anti-Slave Trade Bill in 1807.) At some point in the late 1820s a theater manager in Edinburgh named William Murray, who had begun to feature Ira Aldridge in his productions, apparently re-wrote the pantomime as a melodrama "expressly" for Aldridge, giving the character of Jack a voice for the first time.<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#2"><sup>2</sup></a> Murray supplied Aldridge with stirring denunciations of hypocritical Christian slave-owners and speeches that justified the mayhem he visited upon them by depicting the atrocities that English slave-traders had perpetrated when they raided Jack's village in Africa.</p>
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<p>Melodrama had been gaining ground as a popular form for several decades, resourcefully pushing the limits of governmental restrictions on the performance of spoken-word dramas by providing spoken dialogues accompanied by music, either as introduction or as background to speeches: thus the origin of the term "<i>melo</i>-drama." Like other popular tragi-comedies of its day, the <i>Obi</i> melodrama featured a morally ambiguous outcast as violent antihero. For this reason it appealed strongly to the resentments and sympathies of England's lower-class audiences, many of whom had been victimized by the cruel, laissez-faire form of capitalism then raging unchecked throughout England. Laborers were agitating for the reform of parliamentary representation, the extension of the franchise to middle- and working-class citizens, and the legalization of labor unions. For the most part, laborer audiences were to be found in the vast industrial and commercial areas of the English provinces&#8212;in the Midlands, the seaports, and especially in the working-class neighborhoods and slum-districts of Britain's growing manufacturing towns. Accordingly, the <i>Obi</i> melodrama, with the black American acting sensation, Ira Aldridge, in the role of Jack Mansong, was not the sort of thing that the posh West End theaters of Covent Garden and Drury Lane were likely to take to heart&#8212;and they did not. Except for a handful of appearances at the so-called "legitimate" theaters, Aldridge was effectively banned from the West End for most of his career, even after his triumphant tours of Europe and Russia in the 1850s.</p>
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<p>Ira Aldridge, the great African-American tragedian, was born in New York City on July 24, 1807, where he attended the African Free School.<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#3"><sup>3</sup></a> As a young man he fell in love with the stage and for a brief time appeared with the African Grove Theater in Lower Manhattan, until it was closed by the white authorities in 1824. Soon afterwards, Aldridge left for England, where he soon became the toast of the provincial theaters, especially in the role of Othello (<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/fig3.html">see fig. 3</a>). Billed as "the African Roscius," after the famous actor of Republican Rome, Quintus Roscius (who had been born a slave), Aldridge became a spokesperson for the enslaved and oppressed members of his race, and battled the forces of racism, overt and covert, personal and institutional, both in his own life and in the stage roles that he made his own, principally those of Shakespeare's tragic heroes.</p>
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<p>Aldridge's early career intersected with, and contributed to, the movement for the abolition of slavery in England and its possessions, a nation-wide effort that eventually resulted in the passage of the Abolition Bill in 1833. Aldridge went on to tour the European continent, garnering numerous honors, including a knighthood from the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and transforming Russian acting technique with his naturalistic style. In addition to electrifying audiences with his Othello, he became famous for his performances as Shylock, Macbeth, and King Lear, all in whiteface. He died in 1867, while on tour in Poland, and was buried in the city of Lodz, where his grave is cared for to this day by the Society of Polish Artists of Film and Theater. He left four children, one of whom, Amanda Aldridge, went on to become the singing teacher of Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson.</p>
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<p>Ira Aldridge is one of only thirty-three distinguished actors of the English stage&#8212;and the only actor of African-American descent&#8212;to be memorialized with a bronze plaque at the Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford-upon-Avon. The melodrama version of <i>Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack</i>, based on the pantomime of 1800, not only showcased Aldridge's astonishing talents at a critical stage of his career, but remained a part of his repertory well into the middle of the nineteenth century.</p>
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<p>As for Jack Mansong, he went on to become a hero (or, perhaps, anti-hero) of nineteenth-century English popular culture, appearing in children's books and domestic theatricals, as well as on provincial stages, and achieving something of the status of today's Batman or Spiderman.</p>
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<p>The taped performances of material from the <i>Obi</i> pantomime and melodrama that appear in this number of <i>Praxis</i> have been excerpted from a videotape of a dress rehearsal of <i>Obi: A Play in the Life of Ira Aldridge, the "Paul Robeson" of the 19th Century</i>, which was performed at the Boston Univerity Playwrights' Theater on 18 July 2000 and funded by the Boston University Humanities Foundation. This performance consisted of a number of important scenes, songs, and dances taken from both of the <i>Obi</i> plays and arranged within a narrative framework written by the show's director, Vincent Siders. Within this framework, Mr. Siders offered reflections on the difficulties of interpreting and staging historically significant but culturally offensive works like <i>Obi</i>, as well as non-narrative, contextual commentary (e.g., musical "sampling" from Public Enemy) on the action itself.<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#4"><sup>4</sup></a> In addition, earlier versions of the first four essays in this <i>Praxis</i> number, by <a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">Charles Rzepka</a>, <a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">Jeffrey Cox</a>, <a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">Peter Buckley</a>, and <a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">Debbie Lee</a>, were read aloud as part of the evening's performance.</p>
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<p>The one-night Boston performance of <i>Obi: A Play in the Life</i>, which drew a standing-room-only crowd,<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#5"><sup>5</sup></a> was the basis for the version performed on 14 September at the 2000 Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, in Tempe, Arizona.<a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html#6"><sup>6</sup></a> This performance, which was also funded by the Boston University Humanities Foundation, was directed by Jerrold Hogle of the University of Arizona, who, in the essay concluding this volume, has provided us with his perspective on Obi and the difficulties of staging it.</p>
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<p>The pantomime text used in both the Boston and the Tempe performances was the one published in London by Duncombe and Moon, probably c. 1825, while the melodrama material came from an edition published in London by Thomas Hailes Lacy, probably c. 1850. The <a href="/praxis/obi/obi_pantomime_act1.html">pantomime text</a> has been edited for this special <i>Praxis</i> number by Jeff Cox and the <a href="/praxis/obi/obi_melodrama_act1.html">melodrama text</a> by Charles Rzepka. (<b>Boldface</b> in the pantomime and melodrama texts indicate action that was videotaped at rehearsal.) Some deviations from the original scripts were made in performance. The most notable of these is to be found in the lyrics to the song sung by Tuckey in Act I, scene 2 of the melodrama, "Opossum Up a Gum Tree."</p>
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<p>This song had been popularized by the English comic actor, Charles Mathews, after a visit to America during which he allegedly heard it performed by Aldridge himself at the African Grove. When Aldridge arrived in England he was requested to sing it in numerous performances on the English stage. In Murray's melodrama, however, it is assigned to a minor, comic character. The history of this song, and its precise relationship to early African-American, West African, and English folk music traditions, is obscure. No musical setting has survived for the words as they appear in extant published versions of the <i>Obi</i> melodrama. For both the Boston and the Tempe productions, therefore, a version of this song originally published by Mathews with musical accompaniment was substituted for the version that appears in the Lacy edition (Nathan, 46-47). As will immediately become obvious, the first verse of the Mathews text differs substantially from that of Lacy. In addition, the director of the Boston production, Vincent Siders, chose not to have Tuckey sing the last verse of the song. Jerrold Hogle, director of the Tempe production, decided to keep it.</p>
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<p>One minor but interesting variation in the Boston performance text was the substitution of the word "invincible" for "invisible" in Jack's last long speech before the end of Act I, scene iii, in the Obi Woman's hut. In the Lacy edition Jack says to the Obi Woman, "Quick, quick! More of your charms, which in the eye of superstition make me invisible." Lacy is supported by Dick's edition, but contradicted by the text published in the <i>Oxberry Weekly Budget</i>, which reads "invincible." The Oxberry text, which is all but useless for performance purposes because of its fine print and tabloid format, lists the putative author, William Murray, among its Dramatis Personae (in the role of Captain Orford), and appears to have been published earlier (1843) than either Lacy or Dick. For this reason, the director and producer decided to substitute the Oxberry "invincible," although a case could be made for either variant.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>The papers read as part of the Boston and Tempe productions of <i>Obi: a Play in the Life of Ira Aldridge</i> are here reproduced in the order in which they were originally presented. "<i><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">Obi</a></i><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">Now</a>" was written primarily as an introductory meditation on the general rationale for contemporary stagings of historically significant but offensive works, and of these two versions of the <i>Obi</i> play in particular. In "<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of <i>Obi</i></a>," Jeffrey Cox examines the conventions of pantomime and popular theater, the laws governing dramatic performance in England, and the impact of nationalism and abolitionism at the turn of the century as they shaped the writing, production, and reception of the original <i>Obi</i> pantomime. Professor Cox has published widely on English popular theater in the Romantic period, and has edited many of its plays. His book <i>Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt, and their Circle</i> was recently published by Cambridge University Press.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Peter Buckley, of Cooper Union, specializes in Colonial and nineteenth-century popular entertainment in America. His scholarly monograph on popular entertainment in early America appears in the <i>Cambridge History of the American Theater</i>. In "<i><a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">Obi</a></i><a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove</a>," Professor Buckley provides new information and valuable historical perspective on the performance history of the <i>Obi</i> pantomime at the short-lived African Grove Theater in lower Manhattan, Ira Aldridge's first acting venue. As Professor Buckley demonstrates, the popular repertoire of the African Grove and the impact of early debates over slavery and abolition helped to shape both the personality and the stage-presence of the young African American tragedian. Debbie Lee, of Washington State University, has written on the inter-relations of literature, culture, and disease, as well as on early African exploration, and served as editor of <i>Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period</i>, published by Pickering and Chatto. Her book, <i>Slavery and the Romantic Imagination</i>, has recently been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. Professor Lee's paper, "<a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">Grave Dirt, Dried Toads, and the Blood of a Black Cat: How Aldridge Worked his Charms</a>," links the practice of <i>obeah</i> and its representation on stage to the tale of Jack Mansong as it was first introduced to English readers in Moseley's <i>A Treatise on Sugar</i>. The scope of her analysis, however, includes the cultural, political, and religious significance of race, slavery, and the idea of Africa in the imperial British imaginary.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>Musicologist Robert Hoskins, of Massey University in New Zealand, has probably made the greatest single contribution to our knowledge of the origins, circumstances of production, and production history of the <i>Obi</i> pantomime and melodrama, as set forth in the comprehensive introduction to his facsimile edition of the original <i>Obi</i> score, published in 1996 by Stainer and Bell. We feel quite fortunate, therefore, to have secured his participation in this project. In "<a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">Savage Boundaries</a>" Professor Hoskins examines the numerous thematic allusions and correspondences that Samuel Arnold planted in the music he wrote for the original <i>Obi</i> pantomime. As Hoskins makes clear, these resonances extend well beyond the limits of standard word-painting to embrace deeply embedded cultural presuppositions about racial Othering, gender, and archetypes of the <i>hortus conclusus</i> or earthly paradise as expressed in English stage representations of the slave, planter society, and West Indies scenery. Finally, Jerrold Hogle, who directed the Tempe production of the <i>Obi</i> plays, describes the practical&#8212;and ideological&#8212;challenges of directing the <i>Obi</i> material on a contemporary stage. Professor Hogle, of the University of Arizona, is a distinguished scholar of English romanticism, with numerous books and articles to his credit, whose interests have turned recently to popular literature and drama, including nineteenth-century melodrama, especially in the Gothic mode. His book, <i>The Undergrounds of the Phantom of the Opera: Sublimation and the Gothic in LeRoux's Novel and its Progeny</i>, has recently been published by St. Martin's Press/Palgrave. Professor Hogle's contribution, <a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">Directing <i>Obi</i> in 2000</a>, is especially welcome in light of the decision of Mr. Siders, director of the Boston production, not to contribute a formal essay to this collection.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>I would like to end this introduction by acknowledging the performers and crew involved in staging the Boston production of <i>Obi</i>. To each of them I offer my profoundest thanks! The <a href="/praxis/obi/program1.html">full program of the production</a>, along with stage credits of all the performers, is included in this special number of <i>Praxis</i>. Video clips of selected scenes from the production can be viewed online at Romantic Circles (<a href="/praxis/obi/obi_melodrama_act1.html">view clips</a>).</p>
</li>
</ol>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Burroughs, Catherine. Rev. of <i>Obi; or Three-Finger'd Jack (1800-1830): Selections with Commentary</i>, performed for the First Plenary Session at the Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, Arizona State University, September 14, 2000, directed by Jerrold E. Hogle. <i>European Romantic Review</i> 12.3 (2001): 381-89.</p>
<p class="hang">Cundall, Frank. "Three-Fingered Jack, The Terror of Jamaica." <i>West India Committee Circular</i> 45 (1930): 9-10, 36-37, 55-56.</p>
<p class="hang">Earle, William, Jr. "Obi; or, The History of Three-fingered Jack." <i>In a Series of Letters from a Resident in Jamaica to his Friend in England</i>. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1804.</p>
<p class="hang">Fawcett, John. <i>Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack. A Serio Pantomime in Two Acts.</i> London: Duncombe and Moon, n.d. [c. 1825?]</p>
<p class="hang">"Obi: or, Three-Finger'd Jack." <i>Music for London Entertainment</i>. Series D, Vol 4. London: Stainer &amp; Bell, 1996. Facsimile edition of Samuel Arnold's printed piano-vocal score, published by John Longman and Muzio Clementi, 1801. Critical introduction by Robert Hoskins, with Eileen Southern.</p>
<p class="hang">Marshall, Herbert, and Mildred Stock. <i>Ira Aldridge: The Negro Tragedian.</i> Intro. by Errol Hill. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Moseley, Benjamin. <i>A Treatise on Sugar, with Miscellaneous Medical Observations</i>. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799.</p>
<p class="hang">[Murray, William H.] "Obi, or Three-Finger'd Jack. A Popular Melodrame, in Two Acts." <i>Oxberry's Weekly Budget of Plays and Magazine of Romance, Whim, and Interest</i> 1 (1843): 93-95.</p>
<p class="hang">[---.] <i>Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack, A Melo-Drama in Two Acts.</i> London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, n.d. [c. 1850?]</p>
<p class="hang">Nathan, Hans. <i>Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy</i>. Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1977.</p>
<p class="hang">Williamson, Jane. <i>Charles Kemble, Man of the Theater</i>. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 1970.</p>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> For a detailed account of the original <i>Obi</i> pantomime performance, its music, and its critical reception, see Hoskins.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> This is according to the information contained in a Northampton playbill of 1830. See Marshall and Stock (89). The playbill mistakenly gives Murray the first initial "J."<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> The information about Ira Aldridge provided in this esssay has been taken from the scholarly biography written by Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Those who wish to obtain a copy of the entire dress rehearsal videotape should send a check for $10.00 to cover copying, postage, and handling to Professor Charles Rzepka, English Department, Boston University, 236 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215. The check should be made out to "Charles Rzepka."<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup> This performance was previewed in several Boston-area newspapers. See, e.g., <i>The Boston Globe</i> (July 6, 2000), p. E2; <i>The Boston Herald</i> (Friday, July 14, 2000), p. S13; <i>The Bay State Banner</i> (July 13, 2000), pp. 13, 16; and <i>The Boston Phoenix</i> ("Eight Days a Week" section, July 14, 2000), p. 5. See also the review of the performance by Barbara Rizza Mellin in the NAACP bi-monthly magazine, <i>The New Crisis</i> (September/October 2000), pp. 44-46.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup> See Burroughs for a review of this performance.<br/></p>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/rzepka-charles-j">Rzepka, Charles J.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jerrold-e-hogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerrold E. Hogle</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/samuel-arnold" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Arnold</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/thomas-hailes-lacy" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Thomas Hailes Lacy</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-earle-jr" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Earle , Jr.</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/vincent-siders" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Vincent Siders</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-murray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Murray</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/benjamin-moseley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Benjamin Moseley</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/boston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Boston</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/tempe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Tempe</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/kingston" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Kingston</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/edinburgh" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Edinburgh</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/poland" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Poland</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/country/russia" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Russia</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/jamaica" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamaica</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/arizona" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Arizona</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/continent/africa" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Africa</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/europe" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Europe</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:25 +0000rc-admin22701 at http://www.rc.umd.eduObihttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/index.html
<div class="field field-name-field-index-banner field-type-image field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><figure class="clearfix field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" class="image-style-index-banner" src="http://www.rc.umd.edu/sites/default/files/styles/index_banner/public/obi_banner%5B1%5D.jpg?itok=vdwjb67e" width="800" height="267" alt="Obi, Edited by Charles Rzepka" title="Obi, Edited by Charles Rzepka" /></figure></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><div id="IndexContent">
<h2 class="TOC">Table of Contents</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/about.html">About this Volume</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html">"Introduction: <i>Obi</i>, Aldridge and Abolition"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#rzepka">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">"<i>Obi</i> Now"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Charles Rzepka, Boston University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#rzepka">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/rzepka.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">"Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of <i>Obi</i>"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado at Boulder</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#cox">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">"Savage Boundaries: Reading Samuel Arnold's Score"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Robert Hoskins, Massey University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#hoskins">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">"<i>Obi</i> in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove "</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Peter Buckley, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#buckley">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">"Grave Dirt, Dried Toads, and the Blood of a Black Cat:
How Aldridge Worked His Charms"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Debbie Lee, Washington State University</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#lee">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">Essay</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">"Directing <i>Obi</i> in 2000"</a></li>
<li class="AuthorInfo">Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona</li>
<li class="ChildContent"><a href="/praxis/obi/abstracts.html#hogle">Abstract</a> | <a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">Essay</a></li>
</ul>
<h2 class="TOC">Supplemental Materials</h2>
<ul id="TOCContent">
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/obi_pantomime_act1.html"><i>Obi</i> Pantomime</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/obi_melodrama_act1.html"><i>Obi</i> Melodrama</a>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/videos.html">Videos of the Pantomime and Melodrama Productions</a></li></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/program1.html">Program for Boston University Production</a></li>
<li class="EssayTitle"><a href="/praxis/obi/program2.html">Program for NASSR Conference Production</a></li>
</ul>
</div></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-edited-by field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Edited By:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:EDT"><a href="/person/rzepka-charles-j">Rzepka, Charles J.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-resource-technical-editor field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource Technical Editor:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/person/byrne-joseph">Byrne, Joseph</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-3 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1332" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Three-fingered Jack</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1688" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Romantic theater</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1689" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">abolition</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1669" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">melodrama</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1668" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">pantomime</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1685" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obeah</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1667" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">slavery</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/taxonomy/term/1690" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">African-American theater</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/samuel-arnold" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Arnold</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/william-earle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Earle</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/benjamin-moseley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Benjamin Moseley</a></li><li class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/william-murray" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Murray</a></li><li class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/category/person/charles-mathews" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Mathews</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-taxonomy-vocabulary-52 field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Resource (Taxonomy):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/praxis-series/obi" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Obi</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:22 +0000rc-admin22676 at http://www.rc.umd.eduTheatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of Obihttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/obi/index.html">Obi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
<h2 style="text-align: center">Obi</h2>
<h3 style="text-align: center">Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of <i>Obi</i></h3>
<h4 style="text-align: center">Jeffrey N. Cox, University of Colorado at Boulder</h4>
<ol>
<li>
<p>When John Fawcett's pantomime <i>Obi; or, Three Finger'd Jack</i> opened at London's Haymarket Theatre on 2 July 1800 for what was then a spectacular run of 39 performances in a single summer (the longest single season run for any play at the Haymarket between 1789 when Colman the Younger took charge of the theater and 1811 when Colman's <i>Horses of Quedlinburgh</i> tied <i>Obi</i>),<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#1"><sup>1</sup></a> England was in the midst of a decades long argument over the institution of slavery. While the first bill to abolish slavery had been introduced by William Wilberforce on 12 May 1789, Parliament did not abolish the slave trade until 1807, and even then slaves already held were not emancipated. When the great black actor Ira Aldridge took up this play, now adapted as a melodrama,<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#2"><sup>2</sup></a> England was still a slave-owning nation: an Emancipation Act was not passed until 1833 and slaves were not completely liberated in British colonies until 1838. Taking the stage throughout the period of England's debates over slavery, <i>Obi</i> in its various versions offers one way to gauge the response of English audiences to slavery and to those it oppressed. More particularly, <i>Obi</i> can reveal how difficult it was to find an appropriate form for bodying forth upon stage the horrors of slavery, as the genres and the institutional structure of the British theater worked to control a potentially radical message that was perhaps finally released not so much through the revisions that the text underwent as through the acting&#8212;what Henry Louis Gates would call the "signifyin[g]"&#8212;of Ira Aldridge (<i>Signifying Monkey</i>).</p>
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<p>The basic story staged in <i>Obi</i> certainly had the potential for offering a radical message. After all, Jack Mansong or Three-Finger'd Jack had been an escaped slave who for two years, 1780-81, raided the eastern end of Jamaica and evaded capture until Governor Dalling and the House of Assembly issued proclamations calling for his apprehension. While he seems to have largely worked alone, the fact that he could rely upon the local slave population not to betray him suggests he could be read as an emblem of a larger revolt. Moreover, he was known as an adept at <i>Obi</i> or obeah, a hybridized form of witchcraft practiced in Jamaica which, as Alan Richardson has shown (5-12) was quickly linked to slave revolts, in part because uprisings such as the Jamaican Tacky Rebellion had been led by obeah men.<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#3"><sup>3</sup></a> In the context of such events as the Haitian Revolution and what Eugene Genovese calls the "Great Maroon War of 1795-96," (67)<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#4"><sup>4</sup></a> undertaken by escaped slaves in Jamaica, Three-Finger'd Jack had the potential to provide the London stage with an emblem of slave revolt. William Earle, Jr., for example, published <i>Obi; or, The History of Three Finger'd Jack</i> the same year as the play was first produced, where he argued that Jack was "as bright a luminary as ever graced the Roman annals, or ever boldly asserted the rights of a Briton." In retelling Jack's story, Earle has his narrator proclaim:</p>
<blockquote>Jack was a man! The precepts of his country were instilled into his heart, and he did no wrong. Conscience smote him not; he knew it not. He was not hardened, for he was awake to feeling. He would do no harm to woman, child, or any defenceless being. He was not dead to the ties of nature, for he loved his mother. He was not dishonourable, for he would not lift his hand against a son of Africa. He loved his countrymen, and the stream of consanguintiy [sic] flowed warmly to his heart. The men of Europe were his foes, and he would hunt the world to revenge himself on the sanguinary sons of the white cliffs. From this short sketch I would have you say with me:<br/><span class="indent3">Jack was a Man!!</span><br/><span class="indent3">Jack was a Hero!!! (97)</span></blockquote>
<p>Clearly, Jack had the potential at the time to stand for a radical response to slavery. However, various features of the London stage made it quite difficult for this potentially radical ideological content to find a clear dramatic representation.</p>
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<p>First, we must remember that the London stage of the time was subject to prior government censorship. Ever since the passage of the Licensing Act of 1737, any play offered on the London stages had to be submitted to the government's Licenser of Plays before it could be performed, and the Licenser at the time, John Larpent, tended to ban all political references from the stage. As I have argued elsewhere, the government seems to have been concerned that audiences would act out any potentially radical message. George Colman the Younger, who managed the Haymarket when <i>Obi</i> was performed, later made this attitude clear when he became Licenser of Plays. Before a Parliamentary panel, he indicated that the word "reform" should not be spoken on the stage because it might provoke a political disturbance in the theater; he in fact objected to "anything that may be so allusive to the times as to be applied to the existing moment, and which is likely to be inflammatory" (66).<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#5"><sup>5</sup></a> It is, in fact, surprising how many references to the debate over slavery make it onto the stage at this time, which suggests that there was a growing consensus that some sort of regulation of slavery, if not its outright abolition, was needed.</p>
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<p>There was also a difficulty in finding a form appropriate for representing slavery and Jack's revolt against it. We might think that a historical account of the horrors of slavery and of a man's resistance to it would be a prime subject for tragedy,<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#6"><sup>6</sup></a> but Jack Mansong's story would be given quite different dramatic forms. John Fawcett, an enormously popular comic actor at Covent Garden as well as the Haymarket, made his playwriting debut with <i>Obi</i>.<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#7"><sup>7</sup></a> Drawing his story from Benjamin Moseley's <i>Treatise on Sugar, with Miscellaneous Medical Observations</i>, Fawcett made the somewhat controversial decision to stage his play as a pantomime, where the story is told through gesture and song. The Haymarket theater where he staged <i>Obi</i> was one of three patent theaters in London, that is, they were theaters licensed by the government to provide what was then called "legitimate drama," a complex phrase that suggested a protected legal status, conventional dramatic forms, and a lack of ideological controversy (Sutcliffe 1-7). When the pantomime of <i>Obi</i> established itself as a hit during the summer of 1800, the appropriately named review, <i>The Dramatic Censor</i> (3 [1801]: 15-16), was aghast at what it saw as the victory of dumb show on a stage dedicated to the glorious words of British drama. The play was seen as relying upon "illegitimate" forms of stagecraft&#8212;music, powerful action, scenery, special effects. The struggle between word and action, image, and special effects is perhaps always present in the drama: we can see it in the arguments between Ben Jonson and his set designer over staging court masks in the seventeenth century as well as in discussions about the relative merits of special effects and play-like dialogue in movies today. At the time <i>Obi</i> was produced, the defenders of the patent theaters still had hopes of containing the victory of sight over sound to one moment each year: the staging of the Christmas pantomime, or harlequinade, an almost ritualized form that staged the liberatory antics of Harlequin as he defeats various figures of conventional authority in order to win his love; these plays were so popular that they brought in enough money during their winter run to pay for productions of Shakespeare and other classic writers during the rest of the year, and thus the defenders of the spoken drama were willing to stage them as holiday fare if they were able to return to the conventional repertoire at other times.<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#8"><sup>8</sup></a></p>
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<p>These patent or licensed theaters had a problem, however. Their licenses gave them control over the spoken drama. It was, for example, illegal to stage Shakespeare outside these three major theaters. As other theaters sprang up, they were forced to rely upon the tactics of pantomime, music and spectacle. What became clear is that, just as moviegoers today would prefer to go see the new installment of <i>Mission Impossible</i> (which could essentially be done as a silent movie) over the new film version of Shakespeare's <i>Titus Andronicus</i>, so audiences then flocked to the new drama of sight and sensation over the older theater of the word. The result was that canny men and women of the theater such as Fawcett began using the tactics of these new theaters for plays at the patent or major theaters. Throughout the period, we hear complaints about the use of spectacle, pantomime, music, and even animal acts on the major London stages as they attempted to hold onto their audience; the introduction of horses into a revival of Colman's <i>Blue-Beard</i> and then into Matthew Lewis's "Grand Romantic Melo-Drama in Two Acts," <i>Timour the Tartar</i> (Covent Garden 1811) were seen as a particular low point, mocked in Colman's <i>Horses of Quedlinburgh</i>, for example. Just as critics then felt that Fawcett demeaned the Haymarket theater by offering the pantomime of <i>Obi,</i> we might feel that a pantomime done in blackface could not possibly body forth an important representation of slavery. I think, however, that Fawcett's play with its turn to an unconventional form provided an opportunity to put on stage some potentially radical material.</p>
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<p>This is not to suggest that Fawcett's play embraces Jack and his revolt. The play opens with a rather idyllic evocation of slavery at "an Extensive Plantation in Jamaica," for its opening song both laments the fact of slavery&#8212;as the white man brings his gold to purchase slaves from the African slaver and as the Africans are exiled from their homeland&#8212;and praises the kindness of the white slave owners: "if white man kind massa be, / He heal the wound in negro's heart." These slaves love their master because he rarely beats them, he keeps them well fed with couscous, and he "save us from Three-finger'd Jack" (I, i, p. 5). The black characters who are given the most positive portrait are Sam and Quashee who stand against Jack. Quashee in particular, who converts to Christianity in order to defeat Jack and win freedom for himself and his family, is offered as the anti-revolutionary figure in the play who will succeed because he accepts the white man's religion and because he proves to his white masters that he is worthy of freedom by doing their bidding.</p>
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<p>There are, however, features of the play that work against its overarching conservative message, as aspects of Jack's story and of his culture break free from the play's ideology. Jack, like the Gothic villain-heroes of the day such as Lewis's Osmond in <i>The Castle Spectre</i> (Drury Lane, 1797) and the hero of Maturin's <i>Bertram; or, The Castle of St. Aldobrand</i> (Drury Lane, 1816), is a character who is condemned by the play's final moral vision but who is also intensely attractive given his courage, the power of his personality, and the depth of his suffering. Fawcett reveals Jack's charismatic power as he uses <i>Obi</i> to cow a robber band (I, iii) and his physical, even military prowess as he repeatedly defeats his British pursuers. Again, while the play seems to call for the victory of Western culture over African culture, we also see on stage a slave celebration involving the hybridized figure of Jonkanoo, the lead masquerader in a dance troupe who wore a costume involving an elaborate headdress such as a horse head, a house, or a canoe. In that this scene (I, vi) would have been perhaps the most spectacular in the play, involving music, a procession, singing, and dancing, this counter-cultural celebration would carry great weight on stage. The same is true of the practice of obi; the play may celebrate Christianity, but it is obi which is given the most impressive moments on stage, particularly in Act I, scene iii.</p>
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<p>Two features of the pantomime form might also have contributed to a radical reading of the play. First, the very lack of dialogue allows a response to certain scenes not restricted by authorial pronouncements. The songs in the play can, of course, function to establish a controlling moral vision; for example, at the close of the play, the chorus sings of Jack's defeat, "Here we see villainy brought by law to short duration&#8212; / And may all traitors fall by British proclamation" (II, ix). However, Jack's actions on stage pass without such comment, and thus the audience is left to interpret him as it will, as is suggested by the reaction of the Dramatic Censor which clearly admires Jack more than it feels Fawcett does; we can glimpse the appeal Jack could have in an interesting turn of phrase in Earle's dedication of his work "To him who shall applaud Jack through the varied scenes of his life" ("Advertisement"). We need also remember that Jack was played by the leading man in the company, initially Charles Kemble, brother of John Phillip Kemble and Sarah Siddons. These aspects of the staging of the play encourage our identification with Jack rather than our judgment of him. Again, for us, the most controversial aspect of the play is that it was performed in blackface, a practice with a long history but one we connect with nineteenth-century American minstrel shows. On the London stage of 1800, however, and particularly in a pantomime, there is a possibility that Jack as a blackface figure in revolt would have been connected by the audience with the most popular pantomime figure, Harlequin, who donned a black mask to pursue his own form of revolt, as his anarchic antics liberate the erotic and target those who oppress the poor. It is possible that the original audiences for this play would have linked Jack with this wildly beloved figure of revolt.<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#9"><sup>9</sup></a> While, in the end, I think that Fawcett's pantomime played to a majority sentiment in the audience&#8212;that the slave trade was immoral but that existing slaves were not treated badly and had the advantage of being introduced to Christianity&#8212;in performance there would have been a more radical subtext to the play.</p>
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<p>While the pantomime remained popular in the early years of the nineteenth-century, it was eventually recast as a melodrama. While we tend to think of melodrama as a form present throughout Western drama, from Euripides to the movies, which is marked by rather flat, stereotyped characters and strong moralizing, melodrama was created as a word and a form in the late eighteenth century. Rousseau coined the term for his <i>Pygmalion</i>, a piece in which an actor pantomimes a series of emotions to appropriate music. "Melo-drama" literally means music-drama, and, in the hands of writers such as Pix&#233;r&#233;court in France and Colman and Morton in England, it became a mixed form of spoken drama into which continuous background music and songs were introduced. It was the most powerful of the "illegitimate" forms of drama that came to challenge the primacy of the verbal drama of the established tradition. In many ways, the melodrama versions of <i>Obi</i> strike me as both less interesting and less potentially radical than Fawcett's original pantomime, but they take on considerable interest since Ira Aldridge made the role of Jack, now also known as Karfa, one of his standard parts. The melodrama, as it converts the action of the pantomime into words, resorts to more stereotypical and even racist characterizations. The play also works to alienate our sympathies for Jack by making him guilty of crimes that the historical record makes clear he did not commit. Most importantly, we are told he attempted to rape his master's wife and he also plots against his daughter (I, i, p. 5; I, iii, ,9-10), while Moseley, in the source text for Jack's story, explicitly states, "though he had a mortal hatred to white men, he was never known to hurt a child, or abuse a woman" (199).</p>
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<p>Still, Aldridge could find enough in the character of Jack to make him into a titanic and sympathetic figure. Most importantly, Jack is given a voice in the melodrama, and he uses it to protest his enslavement and to argue that his actions are acts of revenge for the fact that slavers have killed his wife and torn him from his family and his homeland. He sees his acts as sacrifices to "the memory of my broken-hearted wife, my helpless infants, and the wrongs of my poor country" (I, iii, 10). When he is going to murder Rosa, a planter's daughter and the heroine of the play, she asks for mercy, and Jack responds, "You whites are ever ready to enforce for one another that civilized, that Christian law of mercy which our dusky children never yet partook of"(II, vi, p. 22). He accuses the white man of working to "enslave in every clime where his accu[r]sed arts find access" and he seeks to create in his cave an alternative world where "no white man finds an entrance, but as Karfa's slave . . . . The times have changed, and the white man must now labour for the black" (II, iv, pp. 18-19). Jack's revolt is given a motive&#8212;albeit one that had become a dramatic cliche, as sympathy was sought for slaves on the basis of the loss of family rather than the fact of slavery itself&#8212;and a vision of a world radically altered, where black triumphs over white.</p>
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<p>Aldridge was particularly suited to release the power of this role from its moralizing context. We know from contemporary accounts that audiences were ready to hear powerful moments in a play free from any overarching moral, aesthetic, or ideological framework,<a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html#10"><sup>10</sup></a> so Jack's speeches may have resonated beyond the conventional plot that frames them. Moreover, Aldridge was known for his portrayal of conflicted Gothic figures, such as Maturin's Bertram, and more importantly for his handling of key tragic heroes such as Othello who by definition offer a heroism that violates some moral norm; in other words, Aldridge specialized in roles where we might sympathize with a titanic figure despite the play's ultimate judgment of him. Aldridge was also adept at discovering within the restricted roles created for characters of African descent a powerful voice of protest. For example, one of his most famous roles was that of Mungo in Isaac Bickerstaffe's <i>The Padlock</i>, originally performed in 1768 and long popular in slave-holding Jamaica (Hill 79). This play, with a story-line taken from Cervantes, is about a jealous old man trying to control the desires of his young fianc&#233;. The play features the slave Mungo who protests his enslavement, noting of white men that "My pain is dere game" (I, vi, p. 87) and who imagines a world of freedom where "tyed in his garters / Old Massa may swing" (II, ii, p. 96). As Aldridge's biographers put it, such moments "gave Aldridge the scope and opportunity to develop the character of a simple, apparently stupid, slave into a rebel against slavery" (Marshall and Stock 75). We can be sure that Aldridge did even more with the role of Three-Finger'd Jack. Whatever the text finally seems to say, Aldridge would have focused upon those moments in which Jack voiced his protest against slavery and his white oppressors. That is, Aldridge would have engaged in what Gates has identified as a particularly African-American mode of literary response, a kind of ironic repetition and revision he calls "signifyin[g]" (<i>Signifying Monkey</i>). While Gates is concerned with how African-American writers take up aspects of both an African and an English language tradition in order to remake them as their own, we can see how Aldridge could do the same with a British play: whatever the intentions of the authors of the <i>Obi</i> pantomime and melodramas, in Aldridge's hands this play could become a vehicle for protest.</p>
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<p>That the play would have been recognized as being remade by Aldridge as his own is signaled by an interesting meta-theatrical intrusion into the text. One of the songs interpolated into the melodrama version of <i>Obi</i> is "Opossum up a gum tree," a song which in some of its versions protested slavery and celebrated the cleverness of the oppressed. This song had been made famous in England by the great comic actor and impersonator, Charles Mathews, who claimed to do it in imitation of Aldridge as a set piece in his <i>Trip to America</i>. While it appears that Mathews made up his story of how he came to borrow the song from Aldridge (Aldridge 11), it became linked to Aldridge and audiences came to demand that it be included in his performances; Aldridge would end up doing imitations of Mathews's imitations, repeating his repetition with a difference and turning the tables on the impersonator. While in <i>Obi</i> "Possum up a gum tree" is sung by Tuckey rather than Jack, its presence in a vehicle for Aldridge provides a kind of metatheatrical signature, a way of signifyin[g] that this has been made into his play. Moreover, the song, which celebrates various tricky characters, allows us to see Jack not as a villain but as a trickster, an avatar of the great African trickster divinity Esu-Elegbara. In the hands of Ira Aldridge, this play which had a mixed ideological message in the time of abolition becomes a strong statement for emancipation, and beyond that for the end of American slavery and the liberation of Africans everywhere.</p>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Aldridge, Ira. <i>Memoir and Theatrical Career of Ira Aldridge, The African Roscius</i>. London: Onwhyn, 1848.</p>
<p class="hang">Avery, Emmett L., Charles Beecher Hogan, Arthur H. Scouten, George Winchester Stone, and William Van Lennep, eds. <i>The London Stage 1660-1800</i>. 5 parts, 11 vols. Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1960-68.</p>
<p class="hang">Bickerstaffe, Isaac. <i>The Padlock</i>. <i>Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period.</i> Eds. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee. Vol 5. London: Pickering &amp; Chatto, 1999.</p>
<p class="hang">Burling, William J. <i>The Summer Theater in London, 1661-1820, and the Rise of the Haymarket Theatre</i>. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000.</p>
<p class="hang">Cockrell, Dale. <i>Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World</i> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang">Colman, George, the Younger. Testimony. "Report from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the laws Affecting Dramatic Literature" (1832). <i>Irish University Press Series of British Parliamentary Papers, Stage and Theatre</i>. Vol 1. Shannon: Irish University Press, 1968. 66.</p>
<p class="hang">Connoly, L. W. <i>The Censorship of the English Drama 1737-1824</i>. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1976.</p>
<p class="hang">Cox, Jeffrey. "Ideology and Genre in the British Antirevolutionary Drama in the 1790s," <i>ELH</i> 58 (1992): 579-610</p>
<p class="hang">---. Introduction. <i>Slavery, Abolition, and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period.</i> Eds. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee. Vol 5. London: Pickering &amp; Chatto, 1999. xxi-xxiii.</p>
<p class="hang">Earle, William, Jr. "Advertisement." <i>Obi; or, The History of Three Fingered Jack</i>. 2nd ed. Worcester: Isaiah Thomas, Jr., 1804. 97.</p>
<p class="hang">Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. <i>The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.</p>
<p class="hang">---. <i>Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self</i>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.</p>
<p class="hang">Genovese, Eugene. <i>From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the New World.</i> 2nd Ed. New York: Vintage, 1981.</p>
<p class="hang">Hill, Errol. <i>The Jamaican Stage 1655-1900</i>. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.</p>
<p class="hang">Hoskins, Robert, with Eileen Southern. Introduction. "Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack." <i>Music for London Entertainment</i>. Series D, Vol 4. London: Stainer and Bell, 1996.</p>
<p class="hang">James, C.L.R. <i>The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution</i>. New York: Vintage, 1963.</p>
<p class="hang">Lhamon, W. T. <i>Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop.</i> Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang">Lott, Eric. <i>Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class</i>. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.</p>
<p class="hang">Marshall, Herbert, and Mildred Stock. <i>Ira Aldridge, The Negro Tragedian.</i> Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press; London: Feffer &amp; Simmons, Inc., 1958.</p>
<p class="hang">Mayer, David. <i>Harlequin in His Element</i>. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.</p>
<p class="hang">Moseley, Benjamin. <i>A Treatise on Sugar, with Miscellaneous Medical Observations</i>. London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1799; rev. ed. 1800.</p>
<p class="hang">Nicholson, Watson. <i>The Struggle for a Free Stage in London</i>. 2nd Ed. New York: Benjamin Blon, 1966.</p>
<p class="hang">Richardson, Alan. "Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture, 1797-1807," <i>Studies in Romanticism</i> 32 (Spring 1993). 5-12.</p>
<p class="hang">Rzepka, Charles J. "Thomas De Quincey's 'Three Fingered Jack': The West Indian Origins of the 'Dark Interpreter'," <i>European Romantic Review</i> 8 (Spring 1997). 117-38.</p>
<p class="hang">Sutcliffe, Barry. Introduction. <i>Plays by George Colman the Younger and Thomas Morton</i>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.</p>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup>For performance information, see Avery et al, and Burling, esp. 171-74, 202-206. <i>Obi</i> continued to be popular in the theater: it received twenty performances the next summer and fifteen in 1802; it continued long in the repertoire of the theaters in London, the provinces (it was a hit on the York circuit in 1801 and 1802), and the United States. Despite local interest, it did not play in Jamaica until 1862, and then only for one performance of a much altered version (See Hill).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup>We know that Aldridge played <i>Obi</i> in March 1830 at the Theatre Royal Bristol in a "new and beautiful Melodrama, founded on fact, and written expressly for the African Roscius by J. Murray, Esq." Of course, this "new" melodrama was in fact an adaptation of Fawcett's pantomime. <i>Obi</i> had been part of the repertoire of the African Theatre in New York, so it is possible that Aldridge performed in the play prior to his move to England, probably in 1824; we know he was playing the part as late as 1860. See also Marshall and Stock, 89, 250.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup>On <i>Obi</i>, see Rzepka, Hoskins and Cox ("Introduction").<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup>See also James.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="5"> </a>5</sup>See also Cox ("Ideology and Genre"), Connoly, and Nicholson.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="6"> </a>6</sup>There were attempts to write tragedies that treated slavery, including Thomas Southerne's 1695 adaptation of Aphra Behn's <i>Oroonoko</i> (and later revisions of his play) and <i>Inkle and Yarico: A Tragedy of Three Acts</i> (1742) ascribed to Mrs. Weddell, but there are surprisingly few such works.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="7"> </a>7</sup>He also wrote an adaptation of Kotzebue's <i>Perouse; or, The Desolate Island</i> (Covent Garden, 1801), two ballets, <i>The Fairies' Revels; or, Love in the Highlands</i> (Haymarket, 1802) and <i>The Enchanted Island</i> (Haymarket, 1804), a melodrama with Thomas John Dibdin entitled <i>The Secret Mine</i> (Covent Garden, 1812), and a version of <i>The Barber of Seville</i> written with Daniel Terry (Covent Garden, 1818).<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="8"> </a>8</sup>On the harlequinade, see Mayer.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="9"> </a>9</sup>For a possible link between Harlequin and portrayals of "blackness," see Gates (<i>Figures in Black</i>), 51-52. See also Lott, Cockrell, and Lhamon.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="10"> </a>10</sup>For example, in 1810, Colman wrote to one of his partners about a play that was being prepared for the Haymarket, expressing his "utter astonishment" that "Over the Water Charley" was to be sung at the close: "This is putting a lighted match to a barrel of gunpowder. . . . Surely you must be aware, with all the world, that this is a rebel song?" (Qtd. in Sutcliffe, p. 6). The song alone, independent of context, was enough to stir up the audience.<br/></p>
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</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/cox-jeffrey-n">Cox, Jeffrey N.</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-wilberforce" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Wilberforce</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/george-colman" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">George Colman</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/john-fawcett-0" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">John Fawcett</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/henry-louis-gates" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Henry Louis Gates</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/benjamin-moseley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Benjamin Moseley</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/william-earle-jr" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Earle , Jr.</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jeffrey-n-cox" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey N. Cox</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/jamaica" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jamaica</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-provinceorstate-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">ProvinceOrState:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/province-or-state/colorado" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Colorado</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:19 +0000rc-admin22663 at http://www.rc.umd.eduObi in New York: Aldridge and the African Grovehttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/obi/index.html">Obi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><!--Couldn't selectively extract content, Imported Full Body :( May need to used a more carefully tuned import template.-->
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<h2>Obi</h2>
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<h3 style="text-align: center"><i>Obi</i> in New York: Aldridge and the African Grove</h3>
<h4 style="text-align: center">Peter Buckley, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art</h4>
<ol>
<li>
<p>On May 21, 1801, less than a year after its opening at the Haymarket, New York's Park Theatre staged the first American performance of Fawcett's serio-pantomime <i>Obi</i>. Offered as part of the manager William Dunlap's benefit night, The Park pulled out all the stops in placing the durable Hodgkinson in the lead as Jack and casting the Junior Hallam as Captain Orford. Expensive new sets were constructed and entr'acte specialists Laurence and Morton were jobbed in for the Negro dances. Though three other performances are recorded for the remainder of that season, <i>Obi</i> cannot, however, be termed a ringing success with Manhattan's public. Over the next quarter century the pantomime re-appeared almost annually on some American stage (garnering in 1813 "A Gentleman, the original for the Haymarket, London" as Obi Woman, presumably Abbott) but statistically, at least, it remained far less popular than other slave or Indian dramas. The first American cast of <i>Obi</i> had been responsible for staging Sheridan's version of Kotzebue's <i>Pizarro</i> (minus the final death scene) only the year before, and the Peruvian chief always held premiere place. <i>Obi</i> was also performed less often than the beloved Afro-Indian drama <i>Inkle and Yariko</i> (by George Colman Jr., which had its U.S. premiere at the Park Theatre in 1796) or Issac Bickerstaff's more comic <i>The Padlock</i> (1768). The pantomime version of <i>Obi</i> certainly seems immediately less radical than the plain spoken heroics of Colman Jr.'s <i>The Africans</i> (that included a slave market scene) or Thomas Morton's <i>The Slave,</i> both of which allowed for substantially larger play of the sentimental.</p>
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<p>In this tremendously telescoped account of early slave drama in New York City there is little evidence of American exceptionalism as measured by the strength of audience interest in the themes of emancipation, colonial independence or, indeed, race. It is best to think of the Park Theatre, in personnel and stagecraft, as occupying the farthest orbit in Britain's constellation of theaters, but one which shared completely in that frothy mixture of sentimental song, dance, scenic effect and kinetic action that sustained the minor theaters in the period. From the scanty records we possess it is difficult to give the Park Theatre's version of Fawcett's <i>Obi</i> an especially radical reading or to provide it with a transgressive national contextualization. As with English productions, the opening plantation scene disclosed contentment and deference threatened only by the ominous mention of Jack. Yet Jack remained without an antislavery voice, literally <i>in panto</i> and ideologically in the text; ending as a severed head removed the body that had been so active in the drama. The usefulness of Christian conversion was made central to the battle of good over evil, and Jonkonnu demonstated that slave pleasures are at the master's behest, perhaps reenacting the largely white audience's claims of sovereignty as patrons over the performance.</p>
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<p>This then is where one might leave the story of <i>Obi</i> in New York were it not for the introduction of an entirely new cast of characters in the early 1820s: William Brown, the proprietor of the first African-American Theatre, the famous English comedian, Charles Mathews and Ira Aldridge, destined, once he left America, to become the first great black tragedian&#8212;an "African Roscius." Let us look at the figures sequentially.</p>
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<p>William Brown was a highly regarded ship's steward sailing the packets out of Liverpool. In 1817, he retired to shore opening with his wife a social club &#8212;a "free and easy"&#8212;for other black stewards and sailors in the backyard of his house at 38 Thomas Street. After complaints from the neighbors about the open air antics, that included singing and dancing, he moved indoors and, in September 1821, performed his first full theatrical production of <i>Richard III</i>. After this success he moved north to the corner of Mercer and Bleecker, at the edge of settlement, to open a Garden and Theatre, termed "African" by the press, that featured some of his own pantomimic productions and the singing and acting of the talented James Hewlett. The true novelty of Brown's move was that the garden was a fully commercial venture, charging standard prices, before a racially mixed audience. Brown attempted to stake out his share in the tremendous expansion in the city's staged commercial culture in the early 1820s. In the three years after 1821, New York witnessed the opening of two new theatres, the Bowery and the Chatham, as well as seven new sites of minor amusement, effectively tripling audience capacity and attracting a new kind of crowd. These sites would create a permanent place for the new forms of melodrama, for Yankee and Indian acts, and establish the long foreground for the rise of minstrelsy. Their arrival, in other words, marks the ascendency of "minor" forms in the Anglo-American stage tradition and their eventual transformation into the national forms of American popular culture.</p>
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<p>Much scholarly interest has been directed at Brown's own January, 1822 drama <i>King Shotaway</i>; this play celebrated the insurrection of the black Caribs of St. Vincent (1795). (From what little we know it was not an antislavery vehicle but rather an anti-English, anti-imperialist drama for which there would have been no shortage of ideological assent.) However it seems just as remarkable that Brown tried to create, on limited resources, the full range of theatrical forms including sailors' hornpipes, Scottish and topical airs, pantomime as well as Shakespeare. James Hewlett also choreographed two different Indian ballets in 1822. It was within this mix that Ira Aldridge first appeared before the public (at some point between January and August of 1822) as Rolla, the rebellious Peruvian in <i>Pizarro</i>.</p>
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<p>As one might expect Brown did not receive the full respect of the press for his range and ambition; indeed from the start his entrepreneurial enthusiasm had been linked to other African-American claims to political power and public recognition. What was for Brown an opening in the expansive territory of commercial culture became for the established press an exercise in social and political presumption. Here is Mordecai Noah's notice of Brown's first garden in <i>The National Advocate</i>:</p>
<blockquote>Among the number of ice cream gardens in this city, there was none in which the sable race could find admission and refreshment. Their modicum of pleasure was taken on Sunday evening, when the black dandies and dandizettes, after attending meeting, occupied the sidewalks in Broadway, and slowly lounged towards their different homes. As their number increased, and their consequence strengthened, partly from high wages, high living, and the elective franchise, it was considered necessary to have a place of amusement for them exclusively. Accordingly, a garden has been opened somewhere back of the hospital called the African Grove; not spicy as those of Arabia (but let that pass), at which the ebony lads and lasses could obtain ice cream, ice punch, and hear music from the big drum and clarionet. The little boxes of this garden were filled with black beauties "making night hideous" and it was not an uninteresting sight to observe the entree of a happy pair. The gentleman, with his wool nicely combed, and his face shining through a coat of sweet oil, borrowed from the castors; cravat tight to suffocation, having the double faculty of widening the mouth and giving a remarkable protuberance to the eyes; blue coat, fashionably cut; red ribbon and a bunch of pinch-beck seals; white pantaloons, shining boots, gloves, and a tippy rattan. The lady, with her pink kid slippers; her fine Leghorn, cambric' dress with open work; corsets well fitted; reticule hanging on her arm. Thus accoutred and caparisoned, these black fashionables saunter up and down the garden, in all the pride of liberty and unconscious of want. In their dress, salutations, familiar phrases, and compliments, their imitative faculties are best exhibited. . . ."</blockquote>
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<p>The ground of this racism is the suggestion that the faculty of imitation permits the urban African-American to co-opt social spaces and graces not rightfully theirs. To be sure comedy is always implicit in the uneasy appropriation of fashion and refinement; social pretension remains funny. But here in 1820 the new figure of the black dandy (later Zip coon) takes the full weight of patrician concern about plebeian behavior and the break down of deference at the beginning of the Jacksonian era. Noah establishes in his prose commentary on black acting (on stage and street) the basis for minstrelsy's later comic appropriation of the rituals of civility and citizenship&#8212;the stump speech, the militia drill, and the Ethiopian Opera (Hay 17).</p>
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<p>How might Brown have countered this discourse? Perhaps by returning with a surfeit of signification, by overacting the part. While a steward Brown was known to act with a degree of super-refinement, and he was indeed pretentious in the sense he wanted to beat other entrepreneurs of amusement at their own game. This even went so far as hiring in January, 1822 the assembly room of Hampton's hotel adjacent to the Park Theatre for a full rival production of <i>Richard III</i>.</p>
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<p>These cultural skirmishes took place during years of heightened racial feeling. The vestiges of legal slavery were being removed from New York state and property qualifications were being cut from the elective franchise (White 75). Most ominous of all was the northward spread of the revolutionary violence of the Caribbean in the Denmark Vesey insurrection in Charleston during 1822. The theaters in New York City answered with a topical return of stage African dramas (Collins 100).<a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html#1"><sup>1</sup></a> There were local revivals of <i>Inkle and Yariko, The Padlock, Othello, The Africans</i> and new vehicles such as Macready's <i>The Irishman</i> in London. <i>Obi</i> was revived at the Park Theatre on New Years Day 1823, the day set aside in the local African-American community to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade.</p>
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<p>Brown replied with his own version of <i>Obi</i> that June. How might an African-American cast, playing before a racially mixed audience, have handled the easy subservience of the slave characters in the final years of legal servitude in the state? How might the players have provided the local color, as it were, to the gratuitous Negro dances? How might one control racial representations while giving a large section of the public what it expected? Nothing that we know of his staging of <i>Obi</i>, which is admittedly very little, tells us immediately that he was aiming for new kinds of "realism" to counter comic exaggeration. <a class="colorbox" href="/sites/default/files/imported/praxis/obi/images/stagebill.jpg">See original stage bill.</a></p>
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<p>Some clues to Brown's strategy may be found if we work backwards or rather forwards from his staging of the first play that evening&#8212;Moncrieff's <i>Tom and Jerry</i>&#8212;a musical, farcical romp based on Egan's incredibly popular <i>Life in London</i>. <i>Tom and Jerry</i> had been a hit at London's minor Adelphi Theatre in 1821 and had recently opened to a long run at the Park (March 1823) with Edmund Simpson as Corthinian Tom and Joe Cowell as Jerry Hawthorne. The most popular feature of the play proved to be the "descent" into London's working class East End. Fights and chases provided the "rich bits of low life" including a comic Negro dance between "African Sal" and "Dusty Bob." The Tom and Jerry craze spread to three other performance sites in the city before ending up automatically, one might say, at Brown's Theatre. Here, for the first time as a manager, Brown was faced with the task of offering real "Africans" dancing blackface parts (McAllister 281).</p>
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<p>Brown made three telling changes. First, for the Negro dance, Brown cast a man, Mr. Jackson, as African Sal. Since no other theatre employed cross dressing this was perhaps a way to shift the center of comedy from complexities of race to the absurdities of gender (McAllister 282). Second, on June 7, he included a slave market scene ("Life in Limbo, Life in Love; on the Slave market, Vango Range in Charleston" ) in which a white actor was employed to auction off the cast (Odell 3:70). Given the Vesey rebellion only eight months before, how could this remain directly comic rather than appearing grotesque or wearing the aspect of travesty? Third, on the folWithin that year's revival in stage African parts, the accomplished English Comedian Charles Mathews brought his own celebrated one-man delineations of comic social types to America. Mathews too tapped the novel resources of the vernacular, producing detailed character sketches in ways later considered "Dickensian." While in New York he located new "rich bits of low life" to add to the expanding trade in transatlantic comic novelties. In his <i>Mr. Mathews' Trip to America</i> (English Opera House, 1824) Mathews portrayed three black types: a stage coach driver, a fiddle player and a black Shakespearean actor, the latter apparently seen at Brown's theatre. Mathews thus occupies an odd place in the long foreground to minstrelsy.<a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html#3"><sup>3</sup></a> As an Englishman he added a distinctive and more certain American note in the portrayal of "Africans" whereas before most early models had been Caribbean. The last sketch about the actor proved remarkably durable, for it introduced "Opossum up a gum tree" by way of the imaginary audience mishearing "oppose them" in Hamlet's famous soliloquy. For years after, the legend stuck that Mathews had visited Brown's theatre and had actually seen Ira Aldridge as the Prince of Denmark. At long last the work of scholars over a quarter century has unglued every part of this baseless fabrication.<a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html#4"><sup>4</sup></a>lowing Monday, the auction reemerged as "Life in Fulton Market," which may have included the breakdown dancing Long Island free blacks were known to perform at New York's principal marts. Here perhaps Brown aimed at a rough realism, appropriating the local resources of vernacular culture.<a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html#2"><sup>2</sup></a></p>
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<p>But not, of course, its real historical effects. Mathews's comic, lowlife turns, with their strings of ethnic and class malapropisms, took off on both sides of the Atlantic at the moment where Brown left off his local productions. Other actors, including the young Edwin Forrest, began to "black-up" regularly as part of their required stock of national types (Ager 108). On August 8, 1823, the last recorded night of an independent black-owned theatre for nearly a century, the African company concluded their performance with "the Grand Serious Dramatic pantomime of OBI: Or, 3 Finger'd Jack" (McAllister 360) and on January 19, 1824, Hewlett gave his own final "At Home" in imitation of Mathews as a benefit for the cause of Greek independence. Hewlett and Aldridge then moved to England, inaugurating a long tradition of African-American performers exchanging the diurnal racism of the United States for the more exotic racialism of Europe. In Britain, as we know, Aldridge felt compelled to cater "to the desire of numerous parties" and to perform the Opossum sketch at the Theatre Royal, Bristol in 1830 (Marshall 44). Was he now playing "Mathews" delineating an "Ira Aldridge" who had never existed? In 1840 Aldridge announced he would perform Mathews's sketch of a black actor from the <i>Trip to America</i> (McAllister 366). Was Aldridge a compelling enough actor of tragic roles to hold up a mirror, not just to nature, but to the transatlantic, comic popular culture that had forged the racial representations within which he was forced to work (MacDonald 232)? Let us hope he felt he was.</p>
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<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Works Cited</h4>
<p class="hang">Buckley, Peter G. "The Place to Make an Artist Work: William Sidney Mount and New York City." <i>Catching the Tune: William Sidney Mount and Music</i>. Ed. Janice Armstrong. Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1983.</p>
<p class="hang">Collins, John. "American Drama in Anti-Slavery Agitation, 1792-1861." Diss. University of Iowa, 1963.</p>
<p class="hang">Hamm, Charles. <i>Yesterdays: Popular Song in America</i>. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1979. 114-116.</p>
<p class="hang">Hatch, James. "Here Comes Everybody: Scholarship and Black Theatre History." <i>Interpreting the Theatrical Past: Essays in the Historiography of Performance</i>. Eds. Thomas Postlewait and Bruce A. McConachie. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989). 158-159.</p>
<p class="hang">Hay, Samuel. <i>African-American Theater: A Historical and Critical Analysis</i>. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.</p>
<p class="hang">Hodge, Francis. "Charles Mathews Reports on America." <i>Quarterly Journal of Speech</i> 36 (December 1950).</p>
<p class="hang">MacDonald, Joyce Green. "Acting Black: Othello, Othello Burlesques, and the performance of blackness." <i>Theatre Journal</i> 46 (May 1994)</p>
<p class="hang">Mahar, William J. <i>Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture</i>. University of Illinois Press, 1998.</p>
<p class="hang">Marshall, Herbert and Mildred Stock. <i>Ira Aldridge, The Negro Tragedian</i>. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1958</p>
<p class="hang">Mathews, Charles. "Mr. Mathews's Trip to America." <i>Mr. Mathews at Home</i>. Philadelphia: Simon Probaco, 1824.</p>
<p class="hang">McAllister, Marvin Edward. "'White people do not know how to behave at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of colour': A History of New York's African Grove/African Theatre." Diss. Northwestern University, 1997.</p>
<p class="hang">Nathan, Hans. <i>Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy</i>. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1962.</p>
<p class="hang">Odell, George C. D. <i>Annals of the New York Stage</i>. New York: Columbia University Press, 1927.</p>
<p class="hang">White, Shane. <i>Somewhat More Independent</i>. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1991.</p>
</div>
<div class="notesWorks">
<h4>Notes</h4>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="1"> </a>1</sup> John Collins has observed that the <i>Obi</i> revivals of that year might have been especially resonant in the immediate political circumstances since the Charleston slave rebellion found a notorious leader in a man named "Gullah Jack."<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="2"> </a>2</sup> This appropriation is part of a much larger story concerning the birth of minstrelsy in New York and the role of local black culture. See the author's "The Place to Make an Artist Work: William Sidney Mount and New York City." The most comprehensive study of early minstrelsy remains Hans Nathan's <i>Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy</i>. However, William J. Mahar's <i>Behind the Burnt Cork Mask: Early Blackface Minstrelsy and Antebellum American Popular Culture</i> certainly includes much new material.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="3"> </a>3</sup> For a detailed account of the text versions of Mathews's black delineations see Hodge.<br/></p>
<p class="indent"><sup><a name="4"> </a>4</sup> Some parts of the fabrication remain standing since some scholars believe Mathews was personally attentive to local black dialect rather than merely picking up ideas from existing written forms. Part of the debate is in Charles Hamm, <i>Yesterdays: Popular Song in America</i>, Hans Nathan, <i>Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy</i>, and James Hatch, "Here Comes Everybody: Scholarship and Black Theatre History."<br/></p>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-authored-by-secondary- field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Authored by (Secondary):&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="role:AUT"><a href="/person/buckley-peter">Buckley, Peter</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/charles-mathews" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles Mathews</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/william-brown" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">William Brown</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/peter-buckley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter Buckley</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:18 +0000rc-admin22658 at http://www.rc.umd.eduAbstractshttp://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/obi/abstracts.html
<div class="field field-name-field-published field-type-date field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth"><span class="date-display-single" property="collex:date" datatype="gYearMonth" content="2002-08-01T00:00:00-04:00">August 2002</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-resource-index field-type-entityreference field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/praxis/obi/index.html">Obi</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden view-mode-fulltext"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded">
<div align="center">
<h2>Abstracts</h2>
<p><a href="#buckley">Peter Buckley</a> | <a href="#cox">Jeffrey N. Cox</a> | <a href="#hoskins">Robert Hoskins</a> | <a href="#hogle">Jerrold E. Hogle</a> |<br/>
<a href="#lee">Debbie Lee</a> | <a href="#rzepka">Charles Rzepka</a></p>
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<div align="left">
<p><b><a name="buckley"> </a>Peter Buckley,</b> "<i>Obi</i> in New York"</p>
<p>Buckley argues that <i>Obi</i> occupied a small and unexceptional part of New York City's theatrical scene until its strange appropriation by the first African-American theatrical troupe. The reworking of the <i>Obi</i> material is not only placed in the context of the city's race relations but also within the increasing transatlantic demand for novelty entertainments.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/buckley/buckley.html">[go to Buckley's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="cox"> </a>Jeffrey N. Cox</b>, "Theatrical Forms, Ideological Conflicts, and the Staging of <i>Obi</i>"</p>
<p>John Fawcett's <i>Obi; or, Three-Finger'd Jack</i> in its various versions offers one way to gauge the response of English audiences to slavery and to those it oppressed. More particularly, <i>Obi</i> can reveal how difficult it was to find an appropriate form for bodying forth upon stage the horrors of slavery, as the genres and the institutional structure of the British theater worked to control a potentially radical message. The story of Jack Mansong, a slave in revolt, had the potential to bring a radically anti-slavery message to the stage. While the play's initial staging as a melodrama certainly did not embrace Mansong's revolt, various features of the pantomime did serve to give Mansong and the Afro-Caribbean culture he represented power on stage. Rewritten as a melodrama with spoken dialogue, the play might seem to have lost some its radical potential, but the great actor Ira Aldridge, through what Henry Louis Gates calls "signifyin[g]," managed to create in Jack one of the key theatrical images of a man of African descent.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/cox/cox.html">[go to Cox's essay]</a></p>
<p><a name="hogle"> </a><b>Jerrold E. Hogle</b>, "Directing <i>Obi</i> in 2000"</p>
<p>This essay both summarizes and explains two re-stagings with papers of the play <i>Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack</i> (first staged in London in 1800) as these were presented in the year 2000 in two different parts of the United States. One one level, this piece compares the two productions in detail, the one presented in Boston to a community audience and the one presented for academics at the 2000 Conference of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR). In this process, it tries to account for the rationales of two different directors behind their choices of scenes, perfomance styles, actors, singers, and stagings. It also confronts the difficulties of staging a once-racist musical play&#8212;one that changed over time from 1800 into the 1820s&#8212;for widely different audiences in America at the most recent turn of the century. It is hoped that this theatrical extension of the larger project of recovering <i>Obi</i> reveals the complex tensions still attached to racism and memories of slavery while it also reconstructs the conditions of theater and imperialism in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/hogle/hogle.html">[go to Hogle's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="hoskins"> </a>Robert Hoskins</b>, "Savage Boundaries: Reading Samuel Arnold's Score"</p>
<p>Samuel Arnold's musical score for the original pantomime version of <i>Obi</i> generates a tension between the pastoral world of the plantation ostensibly dedicated to Christian morality and the exotic world of slave insurrection associated with Obeah. It emerges to map the ambiguous and hybrid status inherent in cross-cultural encounters during the pre-emancipation era. If Arnold associates Obeah with the wilderness outside the plantation eden, then there are moments which suggest a different kind of discourse. Some music for slaves creates enough space to absorb the idea of grief and in the famous cave scene, Rosa sings the pantomime's "hit" song as an expression of transracial desire. Arnold's borrowings from his Viennese contemporaries Haydn and Mozart is of special interst; the famous movement from Haydn's "Surprise" symphony, for example, is used to accompany a night raid. In the case of Mozart's K575, the music had probably not been previously heard in London.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/hoskins/hoskins.html">[go to Hoskins's essay]</a></p>
<p><b><a name="lee"> </a>Debbie Lee</b>, "Grave Dirt, Dried Toads, and the Blood of a Black Cat: How Aldridge Worked His Charms"</p>
<p>The paper explores the complex ways in which Ira Aldridge, in the role of Jack, brought together the rich cultural symbols of slaves, tigers, sugar and blood. It begins by tracing the play to its source in Benjamin Moseley's <i>Treatise on Sugar</i>. Against Mosely's treatise, where sugar is seen as a cure to the diseases of Western culture, the paper uncovers the debates on slavery where the slave trade, not sugar, is called a disease. Further, by examining the rituals of "obi," especially death and reanimation, the paper investigates how obi actually mocks the experience of slavery. Since the centerpiece of the practice was the charm, or obi bag, the paper pays particular attention to the bag's contents, which had the ability to evoke both the brokenness and the power of the rebel slave experience. The paper claims that Aldridge, by acting in the play, performed the rituals of obi-death and reanimation, brokenness and power, and made obi a cure to the disease of slavery.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/lee/lee.html">[go to Lee's essay]</a></p>
<p><a name="rzepka"> </a><b>Charles Rzepka,</b> "Introduction"</p>
<p>The pantomime and melodrama versions of <i>Obi, or Three-finger'd Jack</i> played an important role in abolition debates and in the career of Ira Aldridge, the first African-American actor of international stature. This <i>Praxis</i> volume includes essays by preeminent scholars of English Romanticism, theater, and music history on the evolution, performance history, and social and cultural impact of the <i>Obi</i> plays, as well as illustrations and modern video reproductions of scenes from both the pantomime and melodrama versions. This volume also contains the complete text of the melodrama version of <i>Obi</i>.</p>
<p><a href="/praxis/obi/rzepka/intro.html">[go to "Introduction"]</a><br/>
<br/></p>
</div>
</div></div></div><section class="field field-name-field-parent-section field-type-entityreference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Parent Section:&nbsp;</h2><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/node/31532">Praxis Series</a></div></div></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-person-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Person:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/ira-aldridge" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Ira Aldridge</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/jack-mansong" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jack Mansong</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jerrold-e-hogle" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jerrold E. Hogle</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/peter-buckley" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Peter Buckley</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/charles-j-rzepka" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Charles J. Rzepka</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/samuel-arnold" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Samuel Arnold</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/jeffrey-n-cox" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Jeffrey N. Cox</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/person/debbie-lee" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Debbie Lee</a></li><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/person/robert-hoskins" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Robert Hoskins</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">City:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/city/london" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">London</a></li><li class="field-item odd"><a href="/category/city/new-york-city" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">New York City</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Country:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/country/united-states" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">United States</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Region:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/region/caribbean" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Caribbean</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">Continent:&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/continent/america" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">America</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-discipline-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Discipline(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-discipline/literature" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Literature</a></li></ul></section><section class="field field-name-field-nines-type-s- field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above view-mode-fulltext"><h2 class="field-label">NINES Type(s):&nbsp;</h2><ul class="field-items"><li class="field-item even"><a href="/category/nines-type/typescript" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Typescript</a></li></ul></section>Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:21:17 +0000rc-admin22649 at http://www.rc.umd.edu